Okay, SO.
To answer a question multiple people had from the last chapter: Why did Daryl shift into fierd form to comfort Beth?
It's a Hathsta's "true" form, the most intimate form they take (also the traditional form for battle) so him doing that - instead of taking the form of a wolf or keeping his human shape - is significant. And I'll be honest with you: I had the idea of it and the image was very vivid and felt right so I wrote it that way, but I'm not totally sure why he did that. But I do have some guesses.
My primary one has to do with how physical the Hathsta are with each other, in order to maintain and strengthen (and repair) group/pack bonds. Even as humans there's a lot of touching, stroking, even nuzzling (and again, isn't at all and in fact cannot be sexual in any way). This Daryl is reasonably comfortable being physical that way with his own pack - at least with Carol and Rick - but Beth is another matter; he might be bound to her but she's still human and he barely knows her.
But she's grieving. And something else the importance of group bonds means is that Hathsta don't just observe intense emotion and feel some sympathy; they feel profound empathy. Which is one reason why the ritual phrase said during sorrowful times means "I mourn with you."
Daryl feels very awkward being physical with her at all. But he still feels the bond, he's feeling it more strongly as time passes, and he felt her grief and sorrow in a way a human wouldn't. And was moved to take off his mask. Perhaps also because if he doesn't feel comfortable doing it regardless, he might as well go all-in.
So. I think that's probably why.
Anyway, shortish chapter this time. More in the next day or two. 3
Chapter 11: how soft your fields so green
She doesn't remember pulling away. She does, must have, because the world snaps into focus and there she is still on her knees but with him a couple of feet from her, and he's human again, sitting crosslegged in the dirt and watching her with an unreadable expression on his half-shadowed face.
She looks at him and then down at her hands and she wonders if she imagined the whole thing. His chest, his fur, how he gathered her in. How he was tense and awkward and it felt as if he was fighting some core element of his nature in order to do it - and obeying some other core element, maybe.
Maybe she only imagined how good it would feel to cry in a monster's arms.
She has no idea how much time has passed; going by what little she remembers of how the shadows were when she went down, it can't have been more than half an hour. So it's probably around three.
Two hours one way for nothing but tears.
"Sorry," she whispers, and swipes at her snotty nose with her sleeve. Her eyes feel swollen, her cheeks hot. The scar on her left one is throbbing gently like the memory of pain. Before, she didn't want him to see her like this, because no one has seen her like this since the yard and the grass, and then later in the hospital, two burly nurses holding her down and strapping her into the restraints and then holding her down some more until she gave up and wept, and then with one of them - calmer, quieter, and kinder to her in the end - it was just holding.
And then of course the sedatives, and when she came back a couple of days later everything was over, and she doesn't even remember most of the funeral.
She didn't want him to see her like this because she didn't want anyone to, because no one has the right to, but while he doesn't either, it's more that...
She's not sure what it is.
Sorry.
She fell apart against him. Was a mess. She can see a wet spot on his shirt.
He shakes his head, gives her something vaguely like a shrug. "'s alright."
No, it's not. But she's not interested in arguing. She scrubs at her eyes and looks back toward the place where the barn isn't, and she figures the least she can do is offer him some kind of explanation.
"The house burned down," she murmurs. "So that's gone. But there was a barn over there. It didn't burn. Now it's gone, and I didn't say they could, and I..." She falls silent as her gut twists, ties itself into a vicious little knot, and for a few seconds she can't draw a breath.
"Who's the land belong to?"
She sighs. "Me. I guess. I'm eighteen, I... I dunno. I have this aunt, this uncle... They're not, not really, they're just some of Mama's cousins, but they're the closest family I got left so they came and they... They took it all over. Guardians, y'know. So." She rolls a shoulder. "So."
"So," he echoes softly, and says nothing else for a moment or two. He's looking past her at the roughly rectangular stretch of dry, open ground - studying it. His sunglasses are off - of course - and his brow is very slightly furrowed, and there's a keen quality to his gaze that catches her attention. "Why you think they tore it down?"
"This is a lotta land. But they're not gonna farm it themselves and probably no one else would buy it to do that. Not the way we did. And I'm... Well." Just me. "But there's a lotta developments goin' up around here now. Town's actually growin'. Exurbs and everythin'. So," she says again. "There's that."
"If it's yours, they can't sell it without your say-so."
"It's technically mine. I'm not even sure it is, not exactly." She closes her eyes for a few seconds, pinches the bridge of her nose. The throbbing in her scars has spread and pushed into her sinuses, and the sunlight is like a hand pressing down on her head.
Perhaps he'll let her borrow his sunglasses.
"And I ran. I ran away from them. They can probably do... Y'know. They can probably do some legal stuff or somethin'. Maybe."
"Maybe."
He sounds distracted. He looks distracted. She watches him and she sees his nostrils flare - scenting the air - and once again the human form he's pulled over himself seems thin, almost translucent, and she sees the hunched dark shape compressed beneath it. Inside him.
Waiting.
Slowly he gets to his feet and reaches down a hand. After a second or two she takes it and allows him to tug her up - lightly, as if her weight is negligible. Probably to him it is.
She pulls herself further into her jacket, feeling a bit like a turtle; the air is suddenly chillier in spite of the sun and the breeze is picking up, shaking leaves out of the trees a few yards away. She looks back at the parked bike, thinks about the road and how it might be better to get back on it again, get out of here, and she's about to suggest that they do just that when he walks silently past her and toward the empty patch of ground.
She stares at his back. Then, bemused, she follows him.
He's walking slowly, deliberately, and after a moment of observation she realizes what it's like: as if he can't see and is feeling the steps with careful placements of his toes, searching for obstacles or uneven ground. But his eyes are open and focused as ever, and when she glances down at his right hand it's pushing back his own jacket, fully revealing a sizable knife at his hip.
Runes etched into the handle. Like the ones in her blade. She recognizes them immediately, pulls in a soft gasp, but before she can fumble enough of herself together to ask him about it, he's speaking again.
"Just a barn here?"
"Yeah. I mean..." She points. "Over there was the pen for the pigs. That was the stable. There was a chicken coup a little way that way. Why?"
"'cause ain't just a barn here. Least I don't think so."
"Well, there's nothin' here anymore."
"Shh." The sound is soft but sharp and it startles her just a touch, his hand upraised to her and his head cocked. Listening.
She listens too. He's not crazy. He's not crazy, at least not as far as she can tell, and he knows this world, or at least the parts of this world into which she seems to be sliding with increasing rapidity. If he hears something - or if he's listening for something - something might very well be here.
But there's just the breeze, the leaves, the low drone of a car on the road.
"You hear that?" He takes another few cautious steps forward, head still cocked and hand still raised. Interpreting it now as a command to stay put, she doesn't move after him.
"No?"
He grunts. "Might be pitched too high. You're human."
She crosses her arms, scanning the ground - and then, for the hell of it, the sky. "You mean like a dog whistle?"
As soon as she says it she wonders if he might be insulted, but he only glances back, a faintly sardonic twist to his mouth, and nods once. "Yeah. Like a dog whistle."
"So what is it?"
"I dunno." He's now feet from where the barn door was, and there he halts and stands, arms held slightly out from his sides. "It's somethin'." He glances back again. "You never felt nothin' here? Saw nothin'?"
Aside from some of the best days of her childhood? Somehow she doubts that's what he means. Deciding to risk it, she moves closer; this is weird and dimly troubling but at least she's not thinking about how angry she is anymore. How sad. At least she's not hurting - or she is, but it matters less. A distraction is a distraction.
Anyway, he doesn't tell her to stop.
"Nothin'. I mean... It was a barn. I played in it a lot. When I was little." She nearly smiles, and there's a harder twinge beneath her breastbone. "When I wasn't so little."
He grunts again but says nothing else, and she's almost reached him when suddenly he drops to one knee, swiftly drawing the knife at the same time. She stops dead and stares, bewildered, as he uses the point of the blade to scratch a complicated series of figures in the dust. Then he pauses and appears to wait.
Nothing happens.
He bites his lip and looks up, frowning. Around, at everything. At her. If he was a wolf, if he was in fierd, she's sure every inch of fur on his body would be standing on end. She still can't feel or hear or see anything - which is getting more and more annoying all the time, because if it's doing this to him, shouldn't she? Sense something? Anything?
All at once he exhales, hard, and reaches out a hand. "Gimme your knife."
She blinks. "What?"
"Your fuckin' knife." He makes an impatient beckoning motion with his fingers. "Give it here."
Nonplussed, she pulls up the hem of her jacket and draws it from its sheath... And stops, about to extend it to him, as the sun gleams off the silver blade. The handle.
What it did to his neck.
"I don't wanna hurt you," she whispers - and something in his eyes softens. He's already reaching under his own jacket, behind, and he produces a long red bandanna, wrapping it around his hand and holding it out again.
"See? I'll be fine."
If he's not worried, she supposes she won't be either. She turns the knife in her hand and holds it out by the blade, and he takes it, and - gripping it a bit gingerly - lowers it to the marks he scratched in the dust with his own and repeats the motions.
Somehow it's different. Maybe it shouldn't be, not this much, but it is. His blade lying beside him in the dust, dull and tarnished in comparison to hers. Hers is small, elegant, wickedly sharp, and it swoops through the figures as he makes them, long curves and quick slashes, winking and glittering as it moves. He makes the knife dance as he works it around a semi-circle, and she's lifting an entranced hand to her mouth when he stops and gazes down at what he's done, motionless.
He's breathing hard, as if he's been running. A drop of sweat is trickling down his cheek from his temple. She looks at him, at the scratches in the dirt, and she knows what she just saw.
Magic.
But nothing happens.
"What-" she starts, and then the world around him falls away like a torn curtain.
She gapes at it. If she had to describe it to someone she would have no idea how to go about it. It's like a tear in the air itself, shimmering, except it's like a hole, like a portal, like a wormhole on one of those iterations of Star Trek, except no, it's like a door opening, like a window, like a mouth wide to swallow him, and what's on the other side is all shifting shadow, clawing for the light and sucking it in.
And it's singing, a high pitched warble that reminds her of the one or two times she's heard a musical saw.
She stumbles forward, a warning caught in her throat, but he's getting to his feet and turning to her, still holding the knife- And he's smiling when she reaches him.
Not a lot. Hardly at all. But it's there.
Behind him and through that tear - she now sees - is the open ground and the trees and the familiar rolling hills in the distance.
Under that endless sky of countless stars.
"Ain't just a barn here," he repeats quietly, and holds her knife out to her. "Girl, you been playin' on top of a Night Gate all this time and you never even knew."